


do whatever you think

by couldaughter



Series: creatures that i briefly move along (teacher!jon au) [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Curtain Fic, English education system, Everything Turned Out Okay In The End, Gen, Minor Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Post-Canon, Primary School, teacher!jon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 10:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24968473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/couldaughter/pseuds/couldaughter
Summary: Mr Sims wassoweird, was the thing. Miss Grant always said calling people weird was rude, and Anna sort of agreed, but she didn’t know what other word to use to describe Mr Sims.He’d only been in with the class for a few days, really, and half of that he just sat at the back listening, but that didn’t stop her from making a swift judgement. 5BG had had student teachers before, back when they were 3ST, and they’d been uniformly normal.Mr Sims was… actually, Anna had a better adjective. He wasinteresting.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: creatures that i briefly move along (teacher!jon au) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1815988
Comments: 70
Kudos: 927
Collections: Teacher!Jon AU





	do whatever you think

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sammiepop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sammiepop/gifts).



> as a qualified teacher, the teacher jon au brings me GREAT joy but i couldn't write one and handwave the fact that teacher training is uh... mandatory in england. jon's gotta get qts first! so this is set during his pgce, which he is getting after averting the apocalypse and marrying martin, obviously
> 
> much love and thanks to sammie, who this is gifted to and is my partner in crime and education, for brainstorming this au extensively and saying, completely seriously, 'what behaviour management strategies would he use???' and sounding genuinely enthused

Mr Sims was _so_ weird, was the thing. Miss Grant always said calling people weird was rude, and Anna sort of agreed, but she didn’t know what other word to use to describe Mr Sims.

He’d only been in with the class for a few days, really, and half of that he just sat at the back listening, but that didn’t stop her from making a swift judgement. 5BG had had student teachers before, back when they were 3ST, and they’d been uniformly normal.

Mr Sims was… actually, Anna had a better adjective. He was _interesting._

For one thing, he was a man with long hair, which Anna’s mum always tutted over and she thought was pretty cool. He had it done in a long plait, and she could see streaks of grey in it. He had skin just a little bit darker than Anna’s, skin that was just starting to crease with age. He didn’t seem much older than Miss Grant, but he had a walking stick and deep grooves around his eyes.

Anna thought he looked pretty tired. She felt tired as well, because her brothers kept staying up late to play Fortnite, and she couldn’t just _not watch_ , y’know? There were strategies to keep up with. She didn’t think Mr Sims played Fortnite, though. Kayden had asked him during his get-to-know-you visit, and Mr Sims just laughed and said his husband would never let him do that to himself.

And for another thing, he actually listened to what all the kids wanted to say, no matter how long it took them. Even Janine, who had the _worst_ stammer, and took a minute to get out half a sentence, he listened to her really carefully and replied like he knew exactly what she’d meant to say. It was like magic, Anna thought. Sometimes she thought maybe he could actually read minds, like Derren Brown.

She looked at him again, out of the corner of her eye. He was at the front table, working with Shaun who always needed a bit of extra help. Shaun was a right laugh, but Anna had been his partner in Maths enough to know he found a lot of stuff difficult. That was fine though. Anna couldn’t draw for her life, and Shaun had done her a really nice picture of her cat for her birthday a couple of months before.

It was a pretty average lesson, honestly. Ten minutes on the starter, editing sentences to add a relative clause, then the rest of the lesson was working on their long write. Anna was having a lot of fun with hers — Miss Grant said she didn’t mind if their stories got a bit gruesome, so Anna was two paragraphs into a really cool fight scene.

 _James, whose nose had just got broken viciously by Billy, looked at the shiny, red, crimson blood pool that was pooling on the cold, grey ground._ She muttered the words out loud as she wrote, making sure she could keep them in her head for long enough to get them down. Miss Grant said her handwriting was nearly good enough to get her pen license. Anna told her mum about it, and mum had just said “Well, you’d better keep going then!”.

“Your story is looking very interesting,” said Mr Sims, suddenly right behind her. “Would you mind telling me what it’s about?” Anna jumped slightly, and turned her head to look at him properly. She wasn’t sure why, but she really wanted to tell him in detail. She kept her nerve, though. She wanted to maintain the surprise for when Miss Grant had to mark it.

“Um, thanks,” she replied. She covered the fight scene with her hand. “Miss Grant said we can write what we want and not worry about it.”

“Oh, I see,” said Mr Sims, nodding seriously. He had a very serious face, Anna thought. The weird little scars all up the side didn’t help. He looked like someone hit him with a cheese grater really hard, over and over, and the little circular holes had cut into his skin.

Mr Sims smiled suddenly. It made him look a bit less serious. “I’ll leave you to it then. I look forward to reading about James’ fight. Hopefully he’ll figure out conflict resolution soon.”

He moved off to talk to Azaan. Anna blinked after him, then looked down at her book. She’d covered up all the bits that mentioned James.

“What’s conflict resolution mean?” asked Prachi, Anna’s best friend forever. They had matching necklaces and everything.

Anna shrugged. “I dunno. Sounds posh though.”

* * *

The next week, Mr Sims actually taught them for a whole lesson.

Miss Grant told them about it in the morning, while Mr Sims was off observing Reception doing phonics — boring as, if you asked Anna — and warned them that if they gave him a hard time she’d be telling Mrs Johnson, the deputy head.

“It’ll be a topic lesson, following on from last week, and I’ll be sat at the back so if anyone tries to claim they don’t know what on earth he’s talking about I’ll be right there to remind you.” She smiled at them, and raised her eyebrows. Anna tried not to smile back.

Mr Sims had been collecting them after lunch for most of the week, so that wasn’t too weird, but it _was_ weird having him do everything after that; afternoon register, mental maths, silent reading, all before Topic even started.

It was nice, though. He walked round silent reading for a few minutes, checking in on what everyone was reading, before he went to the book corner, chose a book and sat down to start reading! Anna wasn’t sure she’d ever actually seen a grownup reading a book just like that. Whenever she walked in on mum reading something she’d close it up and let Anna come give her a cuddle.

“Alright, books away,” Mr Sims announced at ten-to-two. “I want everyone ready and in their correct seats in one minute. I’ll know if you’re in the wrong seats, so don’t try it.”

There was general mania for the next minute, but Anna made sure she was in the right seat. She glanced around the room and spotted —

“Kayden,” said Mr Sims, looking over the rim of his glasses. “I believe I said everyone should be in the right seat.”

“This is my seat, Mr Sims,” said Kayden, smiling sweetly. Anna rolled her eyes. Kayden was always getting away with things. Once he had a supply teacher almost convinced they got afternoon break still before Georgia broke and admitted the lie.

Mr Sims pushed his glasses up his nose and sighed. He tilted his head, and _looked_ at Kayden. Anna was suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of Paddington doing a hard stare.

“Is that your seat, Kayden?”

“No, Mr Sims,” said Kayden. He clapped his hands over his mouth.

With a smile, Mr Sims said, “Then I think you’d better find out where you should be sitting as soon as possible, don’t you?”

And then he just… turned back to the board, and started explaining the starter activity.

Anna gaped for a second, then glanced at the behaviour chart. She didn’t like it much — her peg was always stuck on lime, because Miss Grant didn’t really move people up that much, only down — but at least she she knew what got people moved down in the first place.

Miss Grant wasn’t going to interfere, though. She’d explained that in the morning as well.

The lesson was pretty class, when Anna got back to paying attention to it. That term they were doing the Romans, which Anna only knew from her mum showing her bits of Horrible Histories so she knew a lot about where they went to the loo and crazy emperors but not much about, like, boring normal people stuff.

After the starter, which was a matching activity about what stuff Romans brought to England — Anna was honestly kind of amazed by the fact rabbits weren’t English to start with — Mr Sims really got stuck in.

“This lesson we’ll be thinking about what life was like for the Celts under Roman imperialism, and how some of them fought against it,” he said, so matter-of-fact that Anna almost didn’t notice she had no idea what imperialism even meant.

Luckily, Azaan was quicker on the draw. “Mr Sims,” he said, sticking his hand in the air. “What’s that mean?”

“Hand up before you say anything, Azaan,” said Mr Sims, pointing meaningfully at the golden rules over the Smart board. “And it means… hmm. Who here has heard of the British Empire?”

The whole class put their hands up. They’d done India as a topic back in year 3. Anna vaguely remembered Mr Tingley talking about pencil cases being a metaphor.

“Right,” said Mr Sims. He glanced back at the board, where there were a lot of drawings of Celtic warriors. “Well, Imperialism is… the way Empires rule countries after they’ve invaded. When Rome invaded England they were looking for resources, whether that was things like silver and gold, or people they could capture and sell into slavery. Much like England colonising parts of Africa.”

Miss Grant coughed at the back of the classroom.

“Oh,” said Azaan. “So like Germany going to Poland in World War Two.” Azaan had really liked their World War Two topic. He’d had a whole phase where the only books he’d read during silent reading were the non-fiction books about it. He went to the Tank Museum for his birthday. It was weird, but Anna couldn’t judge considering how long she’d spent reading about the Tudors back in Year 4.

“That’s… certainly one comparison,” said Mr Sims. “But I think we’re getting a little bit off topic. We’re going to start here by thinking about what we already know about the Celts.”

The lesson was pretty normal from there. About half an hour in, when everyone was working in pairs to make a poster advertising England as a holiday destination for Roman settlers, Kayden threw a pencil sharpener at the back of Janine’s head.

Janine immediately burst into tears. Anna thought that was a bit babyish, but Janine was her friend, so she put her hand up right away. Telling on Kayden for Janine was basically her job, on account of Janine’s stammer.

Mr Sims was back with Shaun, showing him some of the resources he’d printed out for them. They were kind of cool, Anna thought, lots of details about battles the Celts had against the Romans. He stood up when Janine started crying, though.

He tapped Anna on the shoulder as he crossed the room. “I know what happened, don’t worry. Go look after her, would you?” It didn’t sound like a question.

She nodded, hurrying over as Mr Sims reached Kayden. While she shepherded Janine over to the book corner and sat on the good cushions, he crouched down by his chair and said something, quietly. His face was turned away, but somehow Anna could _feel_ the disappointment radiating from him.

Kayden looked pretty disappointed in himself after Mr Sims went to the behaviour chart and moved his peg all the way down to Orange. That meant he’d have to stay in for ten minutes of break, which meant you barely had time to eat your toast before the bell rang again.

Janine sniffed. “H-he’s n-nice, isn’t he?” She said, through tears.

“Who, Mr Sims?” Anna asked, her arm around Janine’s shoulders. “Yeah, he’s alright.”

**Author's Note:**

> probably going to be a series following jon as he attempts to develop a philosophy of teaching. i wasn't sure about including compelling-adjacent stuff, but i liked the idea of the scene too much to remove it. rest assured he would not take a statement from one of his kids. his tell, explain, describe technique is to get a child to tell his lsa, and then the lsa writes up cpoms for him
> 
> i know that's incomprehensible, but it's just my life okay
> 
> title from please mrs butler by allan ahlberg, a poem i relate to more and more each passing day
> 
> find me on twitter/tumblr @dotsayers! i sometimes post about teaching but right now it's mostly the videogame hades


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